Dorian Warren

Dorian T. Warren is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, an MSNBC Contributor, and Board Chair of the Center for Community Change. He is the Host and Executive Producer of “Nerding Out” on MSNBC’s digital platform, shift.msnbc.com.

A scholar of inequality and American politics, he taught for over a decade at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, where he was Co-Director of the Columbia University Program on Labor Law and Policy, and serves as a Research Associate at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies.

A native Chicagoan, Warren received his B.A. from the University of Illinois and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He has received research fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, CUNY’s Murphy Institute, the Public Welfare Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and the Russell Sage Foundation. His research and teaching interests include labor organizing, politics & policy; race and ethnic politics; African-American politics; urban politics and policy; American political development; community organizing and social movements; and social science methodology.

Warren has worked with several national and local organizations including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, American Rights at Work/Jobs with Justice, AFL-CIO, CTW, UNITE-HERE, SEIU, UFCW, Steelworkers, and the NGLTF Policy Institute, among others. He currently serves on several boards including Race Forward, Alliance for a Greater New York, Working Partnerships USA, the Model Alliance, the Workers Lab, the Discount Foundation and The Nation Magazine Editorial Board. He is also Co-Chair of the AFL-CIO’s Commission on Racial Justice Advisory Council.

As a commentator on public affairs, Warren has appeared regularly on television and radio including NBC Nightly News, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, BET, BBC, NPR, Bloomberg, & NY1, among other outlets. In 2013, he was included on the list of NBC’s theGrio’s 100 people making history today.

He is the author of the forthcoming The Three Faces of Unions: Inclusion & Democracy in the U.S. Labor Movement (Oxford University Press), and (with Virginia Parks) Boxing Out: Walmart & the Politics of Labor Market Regulation from Below (Russell Sage Foundation Press). Topics: American politics and policymaking, inequality and poverty, labor unions, low wage work, racial and ethnic politics, urban politics, and Walmart.

Rewrite the Racial Rules: Building an Inclusive American Economy argues that, in order to understand racial and economic inequality among black Americans, we must acknowledge the racial rules that undergird our economy and society. Those rules—laws, policies, institutions, regulations, and normative practices—are the driving force behind the patently unequal life chances and opportunities for too many individuals. In

In a piece in the Huffington Post before the first Democratic debate Roosevelt Dorian Warren calls on all presidential candidates to step up to the plate and offer bold solutions to fix the economy and help American families. It’s time for a bold national agenda to address the crisis families are facing in trying to

In Salon Roosevelt Fellow Dorian Warren writes about the White House Summit on Worker Voice and it’s implications for 2016 candidates, unions everywhere, and the fight against inequality. He looks at the critical role that workers and unions are playing in campaigns across the country. With polling showing increased public support for unions, especially from millennials, Warren concludes:

The Blueprint to Empower Workers for Shared Prosperity, a report by Roosevelt Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch, Roosevelt Fellow Dorian Warren, and Project Manager Andy Shen, is the culmination of a two-year process that brought together labor unions, academics, leading thinkers from worker organizing centers, community and policy groups, and attorneys to identify major areas in which

Is the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) broken? Yes. But does that mean it is irrelevant for workers attempting to organize? No. As data in this paper shows, particularly when focused on certain demographic groups, labor unions are still using the NLRB, and in many cases, very effectively. This paper examines the use of the NLRB election process since 2000,

More than 50 years since passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, the little progress we have made as a country in ending job segregation by race and gender has stalled. As women and people of color make up a growing majority of America’s workforce, we must find new and innovative solutions to ending workplace